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I find it fascinating the way a lot of those things that seemed like Tory indiscretions or gaffes at the time were often deliberate and part of the plan. Particularly in the case of Michael Fallon, when he said that "Miliband stabbed his own brother in the back to become Labour leader. Now he is willing to stab the United Kingdom in the back to become prime minister." Widely derided at the time as being way too personal, it was a deliberate move by Lynton Crosby as part of his 'dead cat' strategy (explained in the article) to deflect attention away Labour's non-dom tax announcement. And it worked.

What it boils down to seemingly is that, ultimately, Tories are just much, much better at 'playing the game'. Maybe it shouldn't be a game, but it is. And recognition of that and acting accordingly is seemingly more important than the usual stuff about being the fault of the 'right wing press' etc. Sure, they're players in the game too, but they're not the referee.

Lynton Crosby may well be a bastard, but after this it's hard not admit that he's an (evil) genius. He managed to get an eton-educated, Bullingdon-attending Tory elected in the People's Democratic Republic of London (twice), and another eton-educated, Bullingdon-attending Tory elected as Prime Minister (twice). That was no accident.

Not convinced how decisive political wheeler-dealing actually is in elections. I'm sure it's all very exciting if you're involved in it, but it's pretty speculative to ascribe any impact to minor news items and bits of spin.

I guess it's all about marginal gains. It's true that it needs to be something pretty monumental for an individual gaffe to win/lose an election, but lots of little victories combine to become a 'narrative' - and *that* is what wins/loses elections. As we saw this year.

I'm going to sound like one of 'those' people now. But I've a feeling that if you went back and looked at the 'narratives' leading up to elections in the past, you'd see a lot of them being pieced together by editors (or at least have to concede that media input is a factor).

The counterpoint to that would be that those narratives have to resonate with the readership. But creating a narrative is like carving a sculpture from a block of stone, and there's always plenty of raw material for this coming out of the big parties.

Think you're underselling it. The `SNP-Lab Coalition FEAR` messaging in the last 2 weeks of the campaign was often reported as the most talked about doorstop issue in key marginals by both MPs and canvassers.

Can't actually quantify the impact of this sort of stuff, but Ashcroft's survey after the election revealed that about 40% of people only decided who to vote for less than 2 weeks before the election. Add the two things together - it has impact.

The thing that is never addressed in these sort of analyses is how come whenever an actual voter is asked about the election they usually wibble something about politicians all being a bit boring and "better the devil you know". So I'd hazard a large proportion of the 40% making their minds up in the last fortnight did so because they couldn't be bothered to give it much thought before then.

People only vote governments out when they've been personally fucked over. That's the fundamental strategy the Conservatives have cleaved to for forever, and it works just fine. All the Crosby stuff just gave useless fuckers like Fallon something to keep them busy.

It was a shit Labour campaign. A much better campaign would have achieved a slightly better result.

People were also convinced that Labour would have them in a worse position, which is really the crux here. The people you're talking about vote out the current party when the weight of their shitness outweighs their distrust of the other guys.

This might mean much longer terms of government for each side I suppose, since that was partly what pushed Labour to three terms, IMO: such a huge long spell of the Tories, combined with it lasting long enough to cover an economic collapse, did for them.

And now we have people in support of minor parties. I don't know what will happen with that. It might continue if Labour and Conservative continue to be seen as dead end parties while the literal old guard who stump up the Tories die off...

The main point of disagreement with Royter is that he appears to be criticising the article for offering insight into something that he doesn't think makes any difference - which is incorrect. But there we go.

I find it striking that in my conscious lifetime no government has lost power without having their fingerprints all over a pretty massive cock-up, usually an economic one. And one common thread in the voting choices of interviewed random members of the general public is random, arbitrary and often downright stupid reasons for voting the way they do. There was a letter in the Guardian last week from someone engaged enough to write a letter to the Guardian arguing both that Miliband was too ruthless because he stood against his brother and that he would be an international weakling (as measured against Cameron's towering achievements in international diplomacy).

Most people are a bit stupid, and most people vote for stupid reasons.

of majorities in the low thousands or less... those votes count. Small shifts make a big difference.

I don't think people are stupid actually. Some are, most aren't. They're as strong and as flawed as we all are. Right or left, we are prone to inconsistency and voice strong opinions on matters we don't have the insight to back up. That's people.

It's a common trope of folk on the left to decry the intelligence of the electorate when it delivers a result they don't like. Sour, and ugly, grapes.

But you are right in that those in the political bubble do grossly overestimate stuff, and the impact of that stuff. Often as a means of justifying their own existence/well paid jobs. I don't think this article is an example of that IMO but then again I pay too much attention to it all so I've probably been sucked into the perimeters of the bubble and have had my judgement impugned as a result.

But I'm going to stick to it. I'm not sneering at stupid people, and specifically I'm not saying that stupid decisions favour any particular party. I'm saying that there's a lot of stupidity in the world. What stupid decisions result in though is randomness, and randomness cancels out. In the marginals you're talking about, the gains (net gains) come from an overall trend towards the opposition (or I would argue away from the government) not "getting the vote out" on Croydon's streets.

Quite possibly I did vote stupidly. I am not a member of the group of people who feel fucked over by the last government so it's entirely possible that my vote was part of the random noise.

Whether I voted stupidly or not isn't relevant though. What is relevant is that where voting effectively takes place at random, as it will with anyone who bases their decision on a false premise then those votes cancel out.

The votes that aren't stupid are, say the person who's been evicted because of their benefits being cut and who now relies on food banks. They have a direct personal and attributable justification for their vote. And that's where the trend towards voting against incumbency comes in.

One of the times where stupidity rears its head most often is general elections because it's at that point that an unusually large number of people are expected to make a decision about an unusually complex and unfamiliar topic, that often they are unusually uninterested in :-).

It's a clear and also very sympathetic portrait of an election campaign which was strategically flawed and punctuated by large mistakes. Ultimately though - Miliband's offer to the electorate wasn't strong enough. You can write as many op-eds on the wheres and whys of it all but... it all just comes back to that.

`Another Labour insider told of the scene in the press office when Miliband posed with the notorious Ed stone, the 8ft 6in slab of limestone upon which his six key election pledges were inscribed. When it appeared on TV, a press officer `started screaming. He stood in the office, just screaming over and over again at the screen. It was so bad they thought he was having a breakdown``.

Now, and this may come as a surprise to some of you, but I’m not actually Ken Clarke, but I am an evil Tory, and did a bit of campaigning and so have bit of insight from “the other side”.

What really shocked us plebs on the ground was how unsophisticated the Labour ground operation was. I mean it was real lions led by donkeys stuff. I’d guess in the three constituencies I campaigned in (two gains and a hold) Labour door knockers outnumbered us 2 to 1. But they were literally just knocking on doors, trying to talk to every single person before the election. We were much more targeted, going for people we were pretty sure had voted 5 years ago, and targeting them over and over again, trying to keep people away from UKIP and steal as many Lib Dems as possible. We also had a record of previous conversations, and national feedback on what to say – tell UKIP people that the SNP will eat their children, tell Lib Dems they don’t want Ed as PM, scream the words LONG TERM ECONOMIC PLAN into the faces of anyone who was truly undecided.

When we bumped into the Reds in Spoons one afternoon, and had a chat with the civilised ones, we were really shocked that they felt they were going to win because lots of people were telling them they hated the Tories etc. We were hitting people who were sure to vote over and over again and giving them clear messages.

A good example of all this was on polling day the Labour teller at my station was dragged away to ring people to organise lifts for people who hadn’t voted yet. This was when it started to be obvious that they weren’t getting the numbers. We’d had our voters who needed lifts on a nice laminated time table for a week.

There’s a lot of soul searching for Labour and that’s none of my business, I’m just commenting on the nuts and bolts of getting people to vote for you. The Obama campaign was supposed to be the big inspiration or Labour (or so I was told) but they didn’t learn any of the lessons of using “big data” effectively.

*Yay Tories* or anything. It was more that I was pretty incredulous that Labour were so far behind, when the lessons were so clear from 2008 and 2012. That isn’t an Ed Miliband problem, it is a party machine problem, which again surprised me.

As an aside, I actually don’t think that a Tory win was as inevitable as everyone makes out, even with Ed.

I'm saying firstly that the election result was exactly what one might expect to happen given a couple of basic assumptions that have held true for a very long time.

1) The incumbent government loses public support over time.

This is what happened, it's just it was all Lib Dem support that was lost

2) Groups of people who are fucked over badly will react more violently against the government than those that aren't.

This evident in the increase in Labour votes, seats and share in major urban centres, and the SNP vote in Scotland (which added cherries on the cake by being a reaction not just to the government, but also to the main opposition party who had ALSO been perceived to have fucked them over.)

But my fundamental point is that the main signal in UK voting intention is the individual voter's perception of the government's impact on their own life (note absolutely nothing AT ALL to do with the oppostion's policies or campaign). If this is neutral or slightly negative then the voter doesn't switch.

The rest of the variation is just noise, and noise cancels itself out in systems like this. But if components of the noise are taken out of context you can get lots of juicy "this is where it was lost" theories to chew on.

however I query whether 'the individual voters perception of the government's impact on their own life' can't be affected by campaigning whether positive or negative. In fact I'd query where this perception actually comes from in the first place.

I suppose one example would be reframing austerity in a way where instead of being something which is both entirely necessary and not specific to a particular group, it's seen as targeting one group more than the other and a ideological choice*

That's an interesting post. Ta. What I'd like to add in - as someone who uses what would be called 'big data' in everyday work - is that while data might be free to access, it is not free to interpret or use 'well' (strategically, intelligently, whatever you want to call it). I've got a higher degree in a stats-heavy topic; and I couldn't give you a geographical analysis of voting behaviour without putting some serious time and learning in. The people who can do that on a bespoke basis are either not cheap, or if they're doing it for free, they're bloody rare. I've done work suggesting that large-scale voluntary community projects often have an inherent bias towards wealthy communities, because they have volunteers who professional-level skills in law, in chartered surveying, in applying for funding, etc. I would love to see an insight into relative resources of the two parties.

and we really wasted huge amounts of it. I doubt many DiS people would have got Tory targeted Facebook ads, but let me assure you they were every bit as cringey, ineffectual and badly designed as you’d imagine. But we had the money to do that and still have a big computer which told us which billboards to put in what place.

However, I do still think we used our resources better where it counted. I’ve got a close mate, very labour, very minted. He got loads of emails asking for him to door knock, but not one asking him for cash. At no meeting has he been asked to get his rich labour mates together and hold a fund raiser (party organisers know who he is and what he earns). He’s a member of *Labour in the City* - they’ve never been asked how to get more City people on side, sure ignore what they say, but never asked!

In reality I think it was 50% money, 50% organisation. Not having the cash to kniow what Mr Jones thinks about Europe – not Labour’s fault. Not bothering to try and find out, or (and I really can’t get over this) not having your timetable to bus your voters who need a lift in a target seat is unforgivable.

because that sounds like two massive holes in their campaign - someone with digital campaign and user segmentation experience would have instantly identified the cash/door knocking thing (as you say, a total no-brainer, but one that's often missed even in campaigns where no-one is co-ordinating this stuff).

Second one - no buses - sounds like a lack of infrastructure, which in fairness is expensive and resource intensive, but totally on the opposite end of the scale to having a digital campaigner. If labour's volunteering infrastructure has fallen apart to that extent then they're in big old trouble.

a lot of what KenClarke is saying sounds familiar from an snp perspective. they have relied on so many scottish votes being so safe for so long that, even if they had the money or the boots on the ground, they wouldn't know what to do with such resources other than try and 'brute force' the campaign. which they had a stab at up here in the election - ask their campaign literature was blanket delivered by paid for post. and it showed. compare that to the highly developed snp voter database based on countless hours of door to door voter id work. we had targeted literature which was delivered by hands by the many volunteers. kinda feel half sorry for willie bain when i hear tales of him trying to defend his superduper seat with basically no resources - just him and an accomplice going from door after door on street after street from dawn til dusk. no public facing campaign base, next to nothing online, just occasional tweet and couple of photos of him with never any more than five or six other folk. keeping up appearances for a sympathetic scotland news report to keep the pensioners' spirits up, but hollow on the inside.

I'm not going for the 'tories bought the election with Facebook ads' line or anything - I agree that that stuff probably has a fairly minimal effect. But the idea that the tories have had the resources (whether that's cash or people's time or good faith or even skills) to maintain better networks, communications and infrastructure across the country is embarrassingly fascinating to me

The Tory ground campaign was a complex system - feedback changed the way it actually worked. For example feedback from UKIP voters went up the chain to CCHQ, who then looked at the messages, tweaked them and sent them back down the chain. The process was iterative.

I feel (from my limited knowledge) Labours campaign wasn't, it was a more simple command and control on both message and strategy.

As my political soulmate, im gonna back up what KenClarke says. As another evil Tory I spent a lot of time in one hyper-marginal seat in the midlands. This is obviously all hindsight- it didn’t leap out at me at the time and I didn’t think the tories would win- I was sat in a pub at 9.30 on election night genuinely thinking the seat was lost and thought the seat was lost despite the exit poll.

In hindsight the Labour ground game there was poor. I live in Peckham now and was receiving the same national, unpersonalised leaflets there as they were sending out in the Midlands. In contrast, ours were targeted on national stuff and generally focussed on local issues elsewhere. Obviously incumbency plays a huge part, especially in a tight election where “I don’t know who to vote for, but my current MP seems a good guy” plays a big part, but I was really surprised by how nasty some of the Labour stuff on local issues was- if you have a good experience of a local MP, basically writing “XX MP is shit” on your leaflet won’t have much impact.

I found it really odd that Labour didn’t seem to step up their campaign for a “get out the postal vote” operation in early April- The majority of postal voters who actually vote do it in those first few days and for that week we were utterly focussed on it but Labour didn’t seem to be anywhere on the ground (again, I can’t know what they were doing and this is obviously anecdotal but it is how it seemed).

There’d also been some good work by the tories in getting activists to seats that matter- on one day I was part of a team of 40 odd who travelled up from London to the midlands to campaign- obviously the tories did pretty shit in London, but it felt like our use of manpower was more efficient- in comparison there were reports of up to 1000 labour activists in seats like Hornsey and southwark on election day- obviously they won them, but that is huge overkill, for what is effectively a get out the vote campaign marginal impact on voting numbers.

In the midlands on election day I was working on “knocking-up” identified tory voters to encourage them to vote. We divided into teams and did it in groups of 2 across the spread out constituency, ignoring a lot of doors on streets for risk of getting the vote out for the wrong party. In contrast local Labour were travelling in convoy in Jaguars with flags hanging out the side and were knocking on all the doors on streets which seemed utterly bizarre at the time- you don’t want to remind a soft tory voter to vote!

This all needs qualifying because it is not by any means the only or main reason that the tories won, but there has been a lot of noise about Labour running a great ground game and I don’t accept it. They obsessed a lot about “4 million conversations” but they seem to have been either with the wrong people or totally ineffective…

Think it was strategic more than economic. Don't see any reason Labour couldn't have had the financial clout to do something similar given the cost of a nationwide leaflet... Instead they bussed activists into Sheffield Hallam on a vanity project- something I said was tactically daft a few weeks before the election- leaving more important seats (morley!) vulnerable.

The narrative had already been set in the previous four years, and it would have taken a monumental campaign by Labour to overturn it.

The Tories had an appalling election campaign themselves, which almost lost them their grip on the narrative. The change, and the stabilising of their position, happened in the last two weeks when they, with the press, stopped talking about policy and trying to debate with Labour, and instead switched to making the SNP and potential coalitions the main issue. Enough people were undecided, or frightened of the SNP, for it to make a difference in those crucial last two weeks of polling.

This switch wasn't driven by Crosby, apparently, but the shambolic two weeks prior to it were.

In truth, I don't ever think that the numbers were there for Labour, given the collapse in Lib Dem support (turns out that the vast majority of their MPs had won their seats via tactical-voting Labour supporters who switched back to Labour in enough numbers to allow the Tory candidate to win), and the wipe out in Scotland, but that doesn't make the result inevitable - you saw dozens and dozens of little effects across the country that individually make a small impact, but under our electoral system magnified it into a decisive result.

the Spectator and the Telegraph about how the campaign focus was changed and Crosby moved back from the running of it after being hauled over the coals.

Seems strange to say it, but the Crosby strategy focussed more on trying to get a positive/policy message across when he's more known for the negative and smear tactics that were pushed to the fore when he wasn't in charge.

I'm assuming you've forgotten most of the early stage of the campaign period, because that's when Ed Miliband made huge inroads (as he was given time and space in the media) in terms of public perception, and there were numerous articles from the right saying that the Tories had lost control of the campaign.

lark from. He was in charge, he just changed the messaging slightly. As far as I can recall he was the one who seized the SNP/LAB messaging and powered it through the campaign. The whole `strong economic foundation/strong leadership` stuff was never deviated from either.

Plenty of criticism of Crosby in the Spectator, and of panic in the campaign but... don't know where you're getting the idea he moved back from running it from. David Cameron trusted him explicitly throughout.

sites from here, but Crosby's strategy was that seen in the initial two weeks.

I probably should have said that he was still in charge of running the campaign, but the decision to change the strategy and to run with the SNP angle to the exclusion of everything else, was apparently not taken by him, and was taken as a result of the panic caused at the halfway point.

But yes there was panic at the halfway point - from my recollection, Crosby's tactic was to by and large stick with the formula they'd already established, in spite of many criticising it. However, once data came through that suggested the SNP line was cutting through - they exploited it with his full sign off. It was a gift to them, in essence.

"In March 2009 it was announced that Crosby would direct the Europe-wide Libertas campaign for the June 2009 European Parliament elections. Despite running 600 candidates, the movement only managed to get one MEP elected, and folded shortly after"

all the same, didn't think much of it. Seemed like a lot of truisms about US politics being applied to the UK. And a lot of it is a rehash of decades old stuff about conservatism being pragmatic and adaptable and 'progressive' (liberal/centre-left/whatever) politics being factional and woolly.

And some of it is pure bollocks:
"How can liberals support federal funding for Aids research and treatment, while promoting the spread of Aids by sanctioning sexual behaviour that leads to Aids?"

that The Right are some sort of awesome, unified, election winning, achievement unlocking, superbeast and the best thing The Left can do is copy them. And yeah, discussing it now is part of the pointless search for The Startlingly Simple Truth About Why We Lost.